For sales managers looking ahead to the upcoming month, quarter or year, deciding on the best route to success can feel overwhelming. It’s tough to know where to start when there are so many different levers available to drive improved team performance. As a result, many managers pull multiple levers in the hopes that one of them will work.

Instead, we urge managers to narrow their focus. At the risk of overly simplifying matters, sales reps need to answer one of two questions to get on the right path to achieve quota:

1. Do I need to find more opportunities to put into my pipeline?

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2. Do I need to win more of the opportunities that are already in my pipeline?

As in Robert Frost’s famous poem, managers and reps really only have two paths to consider, not the 15 or 20 that many think they must evaluate. The starting point for the path to quota, in its purest form, is this: reps need to succeed at either finding more deals or winning more deals. They need to take the right fork in the woods, or the left. These two paths are relevant for every sales person, and nearly every challenge in reaching quota can be traced back to them. When a sales manager steers reps to consider these questions, it enables both manager and rep to be very crisp and granular on a plan for sales success in the upcoming period.

How does this work? If a rep needs to take the road that leads to finding more deals to put into the pipeline, it means he or she needs to excel in the sales activities associated with territory management or account management. If a rep needs to take the other road, the road that leads to winning more of the deals he or she already has in the pipeline, the goal is to excel at the sales activities associated with opportunity management and/or call management.

From “Cracking the Sales Management Code”, by Michelle Vazzana and Jason Jordan

Many sales managers and reps lean instinctively toward the first road, thinking a bigger pipeline means better results. But bigger isn’t always better. That’s where coaching comes in. Sales managers know it’s the quality of the prospects coming into the pipeline that matters most. So when a rep is looking at pipeline size, make sure they understand it’s the number of the right prospects that’s important here. This is a great time to get the fluff out of the pipeline too. Reps must be crystal clear on the definition of what is and is not a qualified opportunity.  

But what if your rep already has a respectable number of qualified opportunities in his/her pipeline? In that case, they’ll likely need to take the second road and focus on shepherding their opportunities to an expeditious and successful closing. Caution: don’t fall into the trap of only focusing on the late-stage opportunities. That’s the fun part, but research shows you will be more successful in helping to get the right deals closed if you engage in early-stage opportunity coaching too. See this case study for an excellent example of how coaching reps on early-stage opportunities leads to higher win rates and improved results.

Sure, there are other variables that come into play, including sales skills, market intelligence, sales enablement resources and so on. But strip down next year’s or next quarter’s sales success to the fundamentals, and reps either need more opportunities in the pipeline or they need to do a better job of closing what’s in there. Starting with these two questions enables sales managers to discover the right levers to pull to get more sales reps to quota. And that will make all the difference.

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Lisa Wicklman is a Senior Vice President Global Accounts at Vantage Point Performance, a global sales management training and development firm. Lisa has more than 20 years of experience in sales leadership and management, sales coaching, sales training, customer experience, sales consulting, and sales culture transformation. Additional information on sales management training is available in our ground-breaking book, Cracking The Sales Management Code and on our website, www.vantagepointperformance.com.